Flash Player 10, developed under the code name Astro, includes better support for 3D animation and video hardware acceleration, among other improvements.

Adobe said that Flash Player 10 will now support custom visual effects, created with Adobe's free Pixel Bender tools. Developers can write code to create effects that can be rendered by Flash Player at runtime.

Developers can also now target code to render through graphics processors, speeding up performance and freeing CPU bandwidth, Adobe says.

The beta version of Flash Player 10 will be available from Adobe's Labs site.

Flash Player 10 will run on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000, Mac OS X and Linux.

Adobe said that some of the new features in Flash Player 10 will ultimately be incorporated into a future release of Adobe AIR and the Open Screen Project, Adobe's movement to create industry consensus around Flash-based technologies for mobile devices.

I had an interesting discussion today about Firefox with Mozilla's Mike Schroepfer and Mike Beltzner. One of the things we drilled into a bit was the address bar in Firefox 3 (download). It's being called the "awesome bar" at Mozilla, and while it will end up with an official name eventually (the "smart location bar"), what it does for users can fairly be described as awesome. And as it's probably the most important touchpoint in the browser, it's worth exploring not just what it means for users but for Mozilla as well.

The Firefox 3 address bar helps users auto-complete the URLs they type in, but it's smarter than it appears at first. The choices that pop to the top of the list as you type are not based just on best text match, but on your previous behavior. Sites you visit frequently pop up higher on the list. Bookmarked sites also get special treatment. And since Firefox now has a new high-performance database to record your behavior, it can track what you do over a long period of time; it doesn't have to flush your history every week or so to keep the performance up.

The "awesome bar" knows what I want.

A potential issue with the address bar, for Mozilla, is that it decreases users' reliance on the search bar. And it's the search bar that pays the rent: Mozilla makes money by sending traffic to Google. Schroepfer and Beltzner don't think that the fabulous new address bar will hurt their revenues, though, since searching for a site you've already visited--which is what people use the search bar for only if there's no better option--is not "monetizable traffic."

But that doesn't mean the search bar is out of the woods. Beltzner said that Mozilla would like to "reduce the number of touch points," and eliminate the redundancy and potential confusion of having two smart places that users can type URLs or keywords to get similar results. Ultimately, he said, the two entry fields will merge into one. How the data from your browsing history and from a Web search engine will merge has yet to be resolved. But it will likely reduce the browser users' reliance on Google.

It also puts Mozilla in a stronger position. It gives the browser first stab at determining what the user wants to do, before even Google gets the search words. The Mozilla execs expressed no interest in making money from that position--"We hadn't thought of it," Schroepfer said--but I believe Mozilla would be foolish to not consider ways to make a few more bucks from this power position. The company does not have to sell its soul to do so.

Previously, other companies have seen the value in address bar plays. Real Names, for example, had the brilliant idea of selling address bar keyword shortcuts. Everything was going swimmingly until Microsoft changed how Internet Explorer processed non-URL entries into its address bar, cutting off Real Names' oxygen. Mozilla is in the Microsoft position in this modern re-telling of the story, and it wins. I will be interested to see if the company does anything innovative with this position, or if it instead simply keeps its relationship with Google on strong footing and continues to send the search giant its valuable keyword traffic.

See also: OpenDNS attaches keywords to your router.

The new chat function lets users talk to their friends about the music they're borrowing from them.

(Credit: Simplify Media)

As the self-imposed deadline of June approaches, Simplify Media remains in beta for Windows, Mac, and mobile users. The iTunes and Winamp plug-in that lets you share your music with friends has, however, added three new features: chat, a "now playing" message that displays what your friends are listening to from your collection, and a built-in password reset for the forgetful among us.

The chat feature is the strongest, allowing you to directly communicate with friends, family, and even enemies with whom you've shared your music. It's a great way to give and get some direct feedback on what you're currently listening to, almost like a personalized mixtape with live commentary.

The "now playing" message pops up in your Media List, and is a reasonable (if somewhat navel-gazing) way to see what your friends like from your list. It'd be better if it kept statistics, but it still dovetails nicely with the chat feature. Nothing like interrupting a friend getting their groove on by asking them what they think about the music.

After typing in a city or address there is a new "Explore this area" link near the top left. Clicking on that brings up thumbnails of photos and videos with links to more of each, as well as custom maps for that location.

For instance, a search on San Francisco brings up photos of the Golden Gate Bridge, the city enveloped in fog (a not uncommon sight), and sunsets. There are videos of penguin chicks at the San Francisco Zoo and video from a YouTube user event.

(Credit: Google)

Underneath that is a list of popular searches (such as parking garage, De Young Museum) for the location and then user-created interactive maps, including one showing the scenic 49-mile drive and car chases from the movie "Bullitt."

Dragging and zooming in on the map brings up different options for those results, and clicking on the icons on the map brings up a pop-up box with more information.

In separate but map-related developments this week, Google also has added real estate listings to maps and has been testing face-blurring technology in Street View.

The news is coming out of the Where 2.0 conference in Burlingame, Calif., where Poly9 unveiled on Tuesday a Flash-based Google Earth competitor, Free Earth, which doesn't require a client-side download.

(Credit: Google)

With services like Wakozi around, the movie Half Baked likely would have been about 15 minutes long. The home delivery service has been designed with people of leisure in mind, linking up New Yorkers with local eateries and convenience stores that get solid and liquid nutritional goodness to their doors within the hour.

Unlike online grocery stores of yore, Wakozi's not doing any of the stocking or infrastructure necessary to get products out on its own; instead it's just acting as the middle man to get hungry people (or those in need of the spare roll of toilet paper at the most inopportune times) the means to get items delivered fast, and with just a few clicks.

The system works by matching you up with businesses that deliver within a certain geographical threshold. After plugging in your address, you can view an entire listing of these businesses, as well as their menus, delivery charges, hours of business, and estimated time of food arrival. Many promise delivery within half an hour, although others simply list the nebulous "ASAP."

Since launching less than two months ago, creator Robert Rizzo says the site's user base has increased weekly by more than 100 percent. He also says that one of the things that makes his system so potentially powerful is that it tracks what items are selling for each retailer, so they can stock up on items that are popular with the home delivery crowd.

Also worth noting is that the company hasn't spent a dime on advertising, and doesn't plan to until it raises its first round of funding. In the meantime, it's expanding into other areas of New York, including Brooklyn and Queens, before launching in two more major cities later this year.

New Yorkers can order all the essentials on Wakozi, a service that links people up to local shops that deliver at all hours of the day. (click to enlarge)

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Related stories:
Deal of the day: Free same-day gadget delivery (SF only)
Seattle gets groceries from the Amazon(.com)

Google Maps now shows real estate listings.

(Credit: Google)

Zillow, watch out.

Google Maps now can show real estate listings, presenting pushpins that show houses for sale.

To show real estate results, click "Show search options," then select "Real Estate" from the drop-down list. The Web site then shows a list of properties for sale on the left tied to pushpins on the map on the right.

Search results can be refined by specifying price range or number of bedrooms and bathrooms. In addition, there's a text mode that will be more familiar to the classified ad crowd. (Huh? Text mode for a mapping site? There's still a small map visible.)

I can't help but be reminded of one of the first really interesting uses I encountered of Google Maps, a mashup by that showed Craigslist real-estate listings overlaid on Google Maps. At the time, back in 2005, Google hadn't released its maps programming interface, but times have changed. Not only is the API public, but the programmer behind the service, Paul Rademacher left DreamWorks Animation and joined Google.

(Via Google Maps Mania)

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Plenty of would-be buyers have been named for social news site Digg, but one we haven't heard much about: Current Media, the cable and Web news channel that was launched by former vice president Al Gore.

It's one of the juicy tidbits detailed in BusinessWeek columnist Sarah Lacy's book, Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0, which hits bookstores on Thursday. In an excerpt posted to TechCrunch, Lacy writes about how executives Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose turned down a $100 million offer from Current in 2006 because they had, as TechCrunch paraphrased, "issues with control going forward."

The thinking is consistent with what founder Rose told CNET News.com in February when asked about selling his company. "I've had several friends that have been acquired by the Yahoos and Googles of the world, and while there is some upside in certain things, for the most part, it slows things down," Rose said at the time. "You can't get a product out the door fast enough."

Current, which filed for an initial public offering in January, now operates Current News, where users can vote on the news Digg-style and then see the top stories incorporated into an hourly news show on the cable network. Digg, meanwhile, remains the subject of acquisition rumors on the part of just about every major tech and media company around.

Everyblock gathers hyper-local news and info.

Being lazy, I favor the geo-focused sites that don't require that I do any work. Everyblock (review) wins the lazy-geo award from me: It scans local news sources and public records and shows me what's happening in my 'hood. My participation with the site consists solely of entering my address. Outside.in (news) has a similar function, but its user interface is less clear.

What I really want, though, is a geo-enabled Yelp, both on my desktop browser and in my mobile phone. Yelp has all the location data I could possibly want; it just doesn't have a very good location-focused interface, or the capability to auto-locate me when I am on my mobile phone.

The personal location-reporting sites (Loopt, Brightkite, Whrrl, etc.) require a change in behavior: I have to tell these apps who my friends are and where I am to get them to work right. Integration with existing social nets should help these products take off, but until people start hooking these apps into their network profiles, they are going to languish.

At least one geo site has a CEO who's aware that you can grow your audience more by giving users a lot before you ask them to give anything to the site. Platial's CEO, Diann Eisnor, recently relaunched her site with a new reader-focused interface, replacing a previous design that appeared to be made more for contributors. Platial, unfortunately, doesn't have the rich data set of reviews that Yelp does, but it does a better job of displaying Yelp-like content. We can hope for a partnership.

Platial's new UI is great for browsing local info, but it needs a richer reviews database.

It's when the iPhone app store opens up next month that we're really going to see geo-focused reviews sites and networks take off. Despite its lack of GPS (so far), a core component of the iPhone is location reporting (using a combination of Wi-Fi router mapping and cell tower triangulation). All of the Web 2.0 geo execs I've talked to are working on iPhone apps; many will be available on day one of the app store opening.

In about three weeks, Yahoo plans to launch a project called Corrections in which users of the Flickr photo-sharing site can help with a thorny computing problem: providing the name of the place where a photo was taken.

Flickr's geo expert, Dan Catt, speaks at Where 2.0.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

Flickr has 68 million photos that have been "geotagged" with latitude and longitude coordinates, said Dan Catt, who works on geographic work at Flickr, in a speech at the Where 2.0 conference here. Coordinates are fine for computers, but human beings looking at a Web site generally prefer place names to numbers.

The trouble for Flickr is that it's difficult to actually retrieve a place name for a given set of coordinates, a task called reverse geocoding. One problem, for example, is that not everyone agrees where one neighborhood ends and another begins.

With the new feature, Flickr will offer its best assessment of where a photo was taken, then let users fix it, Catt said. The site will start with offering information at the neighborhood level, but if a user doesn't agree, it will gradually step back to larger-scale regions.

"If you're not happy with what we're saying, tell us, and we'll learn from that," Catt said in an interview after his talk.

The service will remember a user's settings, so a given location that's one person's Lower Haight San Francisco neighborhood could be another's Upper Haight. As more people weigh in with what the name for a given location actually is, Yahoo will update its boundaries, Catt said.

Initially, Flickr will offer its own alternatives for a given area, but later, people will be able to type in the location, Catt added.

Most of the time the service should work fine, but geography can elicit passionate responses. "This will ruffle a lot of people's feathers," he predicted.

That situation got so much publicity, you would think that anyone would think twice about going down the same path. No such luck. Last month, Scientology threatened Wikileaks for hosting Scientology documents, and this morning (as a whole bunch of folks have sent in) news is coming out that the Mormon Church is threatening Wikileaks as well, for hosting church documents. In this case, the Mormon Church isn't just going after Wikileaks, but also threatened the WikiMedia foundation and document hosting site Scribd. It went after WikiMedia because WikiNews ran an article about the document and linked to them (which is hardly copyright infringement). Scribd was apparently hosting a copy of the documents as well (since taken down). Wikileaks, however, true to its charter, is refusing to take down the documents.

While you can understand why the Church might not like it's documents being made public, it does seem ridiculous that whoever decided to start threatening everyone didn't do the most basic research to recognize what would happen as soon as they threatened sites. Given what happened with Julius Baer, it should have been abundantly clear that threatening Wikileaks would almost guarantee that the documents were both more widely seen than before and copied widely across the internet.

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Video and text don't always go together, but that's not stopping video and audio microblogging service Seesmic from partnering with the distributed comment tool Disqus. Starting Wednesday, users of Disqus will get the added benefit of video commenting alongside the text entry field.

The option is turned off by default in Disqus, and must be enabled by whoever is administrating the account. We've gone ahead and turned it on in the Webware 100 winner pages, where we've been using Disqus since unveiling the 100 winners late last month. I've also added it to the end of this post, where you can add your own video comment after the break.

One small hiccup I've found is that Seesmic won't pull in your Disqus account information. You've got to be registered with the currently private alpha service to have it linked up with any sort of account. Otherwise you're limited to leaving an anonymous comment that can later be reclaimed when you get Seesmic access. Disqus founder Daniel Ha tells me the two companies are working on deeper integration for user authentication, but in the meantime anonymous recording is the easiest option for people who don't yet have Seesmic accounts.

I'm still not sold on the trend of video commenting. It's a bit gimmicky, and as others have said, it makes conversations difficult to parse. Ideally I'd like to see services like Seesmic partner with Jott to add a small transcript under the comment that would save me some time, and improve the experience for search engine bots, the deaf, and others who don't feel like watching and listening to what could be a simple sentence or two of thought.

Adding video comments to your Disqus account is as simple as clicking a check box. By default video comments are turned off until a Disqus admin turns them on.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

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The lawsuit involved Univeral Music, who lost the original decision and was hit with a rather large fine. Universal Music appealed that decision on a variety of points -- and appears to have convinced the judge that the punitive damages tacked onto the copyright infringement claims were unconstitutional. This is quite interesting because, as Ray Beckerman notes in that link, Universal Music is involved in a bunch of lawsuits where it's pushing for extremely high fines for individuals found guilty of infringement. In fact, Universal Music is actually on the receiving end of a lawsuit that accuses the company of requesting unconstitutionally high fines. In that case, Universal Music is asking for fines that are more than 1,000x the actual damages. Pretty high, right? So what were the damages that Universal Music (and the court) found so unconstitutionally high in this case from Bridgeport? Turns out they were about 10x the actual damages. Funny how that works.

It seems like Universal Music may come to regret pointing out the variety of reasons (pdf) why punitive damages can be seen as unconstitutional, as one would imagine that UMG's own filing will be raised against it in its own copyright infringement suits:

"While the Supreme Court has declined to adopt concrete or bright-line constitutional limits for the ratio between actual or potential harm and a punitive-damage award, the Court nonetheless observed that, "in practice, few awards exceeding a singled-digit ratio between punitive and compensatory damages, to a significant degree, will satisfy due process."... The court cited a 4-to-1 ratio as being close to the line of unconstitutional impropriety."

Universal Music would likely claim in its own defense that it was complaining about punitive damages, and in the other lawsuits it's fighting for statutory damages, but there are already plenty of folks pointing out that there really isn't much of a difference in many cases.

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